Two states consider two new ways to fund college tuition: Tennessee is considering the “Tennessee Promise,” which proposes free tuition for two years of community college or technical school and would be funded through sales of lottery tickets. Oregon is considering “The Pay It Forward” program, which I’ve previously discussed here, in which students would pay no tuition upfront—rather they’d pay a small percentage of their income for a set number of years after graduating from college.

Since studies show that, in many states, lottery ticket sales are higher than average in impoverished regions, Richard Wolff, a professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, says this is fundamentally unfair: “A lottery is a tax on middle- and lower-income people. So if you are going to use this you are basically saying that in Tennessee the cost of college will be subsidized by lower-income people.”

Susan Dynarski, professor of economics, education and public policy at the University of Michigan, says that is true but not the only thing to consider. “If a lottery is already in place and the tickets are being bought anyway then why not use the funds for education?”

And we’ve talked a little bit about the issues with Oregon’s “Pay It Forward” program, which is that it may discourage students entering high earning fields from taking part in the program, and that it is another form of of an “income-based repayment” program.

Says Richard Wolff, the economist at Amherst: “This is like choosing between a crappy and a more crappy option.” But the fact that there are proposals popping up to fix the student loan system is promising.

Georgia has been funding college for students with lottery ticket sales for… as long as I can remember, with the HOPE scholarship. It has a GPA requirement (above a 3.0, I think). It’s worked out really well for quite a few people I went to high school with!

West Virginia has had a PROMISE Scholarship award for over a decade now (available to WV residents who meet certain eligibility requirements, students must attend an in-state institution). It allowed me to earn an undergraduate degree debt-free, but I left the state upon graduation because, well, who wants to live in West Virginia forever?